Bursting with percussion breaks, bass surges, anime samples, and blurts of noise, this eight-song release (with track titles like “Asuka Langley Soryu”, “There’s No Way I Would Regret This”, and “Nurse Witch Komugi”) zips through its run with high energy and an almost incessantly joking attitude. Some odd atmospheric effects, such as the high-pitched droning tones of
“My Two-Faced Little Sister”, help lift it above the usual level for the style, but for the most part, the emphasis is on overall energy more than individual moments.
Presenting its songs in alphabetical order of their creators, this compilation throws together noise, breakcore, illbient, grind, and more, with little linking the tracks beyond a freeness of compositional style and an almost confrontational counter-cultural attitude. Ranging from clear echoing tones to thick-clustered lo-fi buzz bursts, the compilation appears to have given its contributors entirely free rein on their direction, though that’s likely for the best. There also seems to be little more to the title than the release being issued on Valentine’s Day, with the relatively few anime samples for the genre further cutting off any sense of the claimed “2D Goddess” dedication. Weird for the sake of weirdness, but there are some good tracks lurking in its recesses.
With the eighteen tracks of this album (only five of which run over two minutes long), LOLI RIPE churns out a manic mix of breaks, noise, heavily altered pop samples, and signal degradation, zipping through pounding percussive loops while higher-register incidents flicker past in swift rotation, on into fine-ground audio disintegration, drill-beats, and other uneasy listening. Most of the time, the adapted samples are too obscured by their filtering and other treatments to recognize what the joke is, but the track titles spot them out, with names like “I Fucked Up ;_;“, “I Want You To Relax Your Anus“, and “Haha! Butts :)“ giving more identifiable character to the album than the disparate nature of the songs themselves.
When focused on just diving into the noise, the album leans into some surprisingly nuanced sounds, but the broad majority of it seems to try to keep from taking itself too seriously, by way of anime samples, blasts of static, and obnoxious techno-mocking excess. Alternately frantic and drudgy, it ends up being one of the lower points in LOLI RIPE’s catalog due to bloat, more than anything else.
Scrambled Brains 